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About Baker City herald. (Baker City, Or.) 1990-current | View Entire Issue (July 23, 2020)
4A THURSDAY, JULY 23, 2020 Baker City, Oregon Write a letter news@bakercityherald.com EDITORIAL Uncertainty abounds for this fall The Baker School District is preparing to welcome students to classrooms, most likely on Sept. 8, for the fi rst time since schools were closed in March due to the pandemic. The original schedule set Aug. 31 as the fi rst day, but Super- intendent Mark Witty has proposed to move back the opening until the day after Labor Day to give teachers and other staff an additional week to prepare for the changes necessitated by precautions designed to reduce the risk of spreading the virus. The Baker School Board will meet July 30 to consider Witty’s plan. It’s a good idea, and the board should approve it. District offi cials are also working on a detailed reopening plan that the Board will consider during its Aug. 13 meeting. The District is required to submit that plan to the Oregon Department of Education for review by Aug. 15. The district’s preparations are gratifying. They refl ect the optimistic viewpoint about the ability for public schools to return to something like normalcy after a spring and summer that were decidedly abnormal. Which is not to say that the fall of 2020 will closely resemble the fall of 2019. The best-case scenario is that Baker students from kinder- garten through sixth-grade will learn in their classrooms as usual, Monday through Thursday. The district’s plan is to divide middle school and high school student bodies into two groups. One group would attend class- es in person 2 days per week, while the other group is taking the same classes through the district’s new online portal, a technology that Witty said is considerably more user-friendly than what the district employed this spring, when all classes, at all levels, were conducted online. But there are also legitimate reasons to be pessimistic about the prospect of students returning to their classrooms, fresh pencils and unmarked notebooks in hand, as autumn approaches. The rising rate of COVID-19 infections inevitably prompts some people, both parents and school employees, to wonder whether even an ambitious sanitation protocol, combined with an emphasis on social distancing and face coverings, can keep the virus at bay inside schools. Witty said Tuesday that parents of 52 students have told the district they plan to have their children attend classes online. He acknowledged last week that “I think we have to realize that we might have to prepare for all-online this year at some point.” For the past two weekly measuring periods — July 6-18 — 5.8% of Oregonians tested for COVID-19 were positive. That’s the highest rate since early March. The recent daily record highs in new cases do not refl ect only an increase in the number of people being tested (although that number has risen steadily as well) but also a higher percentage rate of infections. Baker County has fared comparatively well, to be sure. But of the county’s 16 COVID-19 cases, 15 have been re- ported since June 30. Oregon Public Employees United, a group whose members include public school teachers and other school employees, is- sued a press release this week that tosses a figurative bucket of cold water on the feverish efforts to plan a fall school schedule. The group contends that “any return to on-site learning fi rst requires that there are no new cases of COVID-19 in a school district’s surrounding counties for at least 2 weeks.” The press release also contends that resuming in-person classes without adequate safety measures could have “disas- trous consequences” and would be “an immoral decision.” Beyond the classroom, the prospects for athletics is not exactly promising, either. Buell Gonzales Jr., the Baker School District’s athletic director, said last week that fall sports schedules will al- most certainly be affected, with football the most likely to be postponed. California offi cials announced this week that fall sports in that state won’t start until December or January. Washington high schools won’t play football until next spring. The Oregon School Activities Association will decide this week what to do with the fall schedule in our state. Baker County residents, as mentioned above, have man- aged the pandemic about as well as could be hoped. And well enough to justify the modifi ed school schedule the Baker District is proposing. But that still might not be good enough. — Jayson Jacoby, Baker City Herald editor Opening colleges is risky, but the alternative is worse Soaring coronavirus infec- tions have provoked a lot of ANDREA GABOR second thoughts among U.S. colleges and universities that were hoping to resume at least some in-person instruction in they will need to make accom- the fall. That’s understandable, but modations for their fi nancial and troubling. logistical needs. Even schools that It’s crucial to engage students in are offering mostly virtual courses meaningful collaborative experi- in the fall should open school ences that are diffi cult to achieve buildings, including lecture halls on Zoom. The damage to young and libraries, for students who do people and institutions of higher not have a quiet place to work or learning will be deep and lasting adequate internet connections at unless administrators develop cre- home. ative ways — in concert with both More universities will need to students and faculty — to revive think unconventionally. One model key aspects of campus life. is Rice University in Houston, There’s no doubt that even which is building outdoor struc- partial reopenings will entail risks tures. Another is Amherst College, for colleges, though different ones which faces much colder weather from those facing K-12 schools. in Massachusetts, and is erecting For one thing, over one-third of 20 tents for seminar-style classes. tenure-track faculty are 55 or All universities should strive older, signifi cantly more than to make accommodations for the general working population students studying subjects like — putting college professors at laboratory sciences and fi ne arts, greater risk of contracting life- which rely on hands-on work. To threatening forms of COVID-19. be sure, these classes will re- Then too, while online education quire students and professors to is far from ideal even for college shoulder a certain degree of risk, students, young adults are better and will involve unanticipated equipped than children to handle expense. Oregon State University virtual classes. College students in Corvallis, for example, guaran- also have the ability to take a gap tees employers that its forestry year if they don’t like their college’s graduates will be “fi eld ready” and educational offerings. capable of doing everything from Focusing on freshman, a prior- measuring trees to collecting data ity for institutions like Harvard on forest sites — learning that University in Massachusetts and cannot be supervised remotely. For Bowdoin College in Maine, which classes with over 50 students, the are allowing some students to forestry department will deliver return while offering most instruc- lectures online; labs, which typi- tion online, will allow universities cally have fewer than 30 students to build a campus culture for their and involve van rides to forests newest recruits. Freshman also around the state, will be conducted need help making the transition in person. from high school, where learning To accommodate social dis- often follows mandates, to college tancing and the added costs of where, ideally, they select their the pandemic, “everything will own courses and schedules and shrink,” predicted Mindy Crandall, develop their own intellectual assistant professor of forestry interests. policy at Oregon State, noting The pandemic is also a good that the university’s College of opportunity for schools such as Forestry will need to hire more Princeton University, which are vans to transport students. At the welcoming at least one other grade same time, they will have to forgo cohort, to create a buddy culture longer trips that, in years past, aimed at supporting younger stu- exposed students to more forest dents and enlisting undergradu- ecosystems. “Students won’t get ates in brainstorming healthy the breadth of experience and the campus interactions and creative exposure,” she said. solutions to living and learning Indeed, public universities espe- in a pandemic. Masha Gessen, an cially are facing a host of fi nancial author and essayist, suggested pressures that only extra funding in the New Yorker that students from the federal government can “could form quarantine study pods” alleviate. With state revenues that could “embrace mutual care shrinking due to COVID-19, uni- and interdependence.” Such study versities sorely need an infusion of pods could embark on team-based independent studies that might learn from, and propose solutions to, problems including pandemic living and the social upheaval America has claimed land sparked by the most recent police shootings — both subjects of inter- by right of conquest A recent letter to the editor quoted est to young people. that America had “taken no land in At a time when colleges are its victory.” Following the Mexican striving to recruit more students War of 1848 the U.S. took, by right from marginalized communities, aid beyond the $14 billion avail- able through the Cares Act, the $2 trillion coronavirus relief package that Congress passed in March. For example, Rutgers University in New Jersey has taken a $183 million hit so far; only $27 million of that will be made up by funds from the Cares Act. Colleges breathed a sigh of relief when the administration of Presi- dent Donald Trump backed away from its threat to withhold visas from international students, who are a source of both intellectual diversity and much-needed rev- enue. At Baruch College in New York City, where I teach and where international students made up 11.6% of enrollment last year and paid close to $19,000 apiece in tuition, it’s still unclear what toll Trump administration policies and the pandemic will have on interna- tional enrollments this fall. A recent Democratic Senate proposal to add $132 billion for higher education singles out tribal colleges and historically Black in- stitutions, many of which are now fi ghting for survival. The histori- cally Black schools produce 42% of the nation’s Black engineers and 80% of its Black judges. Such legislative initiatives need to be given priority. At the same time, university systems like the City University of New York and the University of California that will go almost en- tirely online in the fall, need to do more to open campuses. Precisely because public transportation and tall buildings on many of these campuses create unique risks, universities need to include faculty unions in their planning. They will also need to lead by example, cut- ting administrative staff and sala- ries before demanding concessions from faculty, many of whom are low-paid adjuncts. CUNY recently laid off 2,800 staff, including many adjuncts who will also lose their health-care benefi ts. The pandemic will test the ingenuity of college campuses. But even the most creative need politi- cal leaders and the public to put education fi rst. Andrea Gabor, a former editor at Business Week and U.S. News & World Report, is the Bloomberg chair of business journalism at Baruch College of the City University of New York and the author of “After the Education Wars: How Smart Schools Upend the Business of Reform.” Your views of conquest, California, Nevada and Utah, most of New Mexico, Arizona and Colorado, parts of Texas, Okla- homa, Kansas and Wyoming. Steve Smith Baker City
